Victoria Cornelius PhD

Victoria Cornelius is the Director of the Imperial Clinical Trials Unit (ICTU) and holds a Chair in Medical Statistics and Trial Methodology at Imperial College London. Her research in trials includes evaluating drug and complex interventions and developing approaches that promote statistical efficiency in both Bayesian and frequentist frameworks. Victoria is dedicated to translating best statistical practices into applied research. She established the NIHR Statistics Group in 2011 with support from NOCRI, and the ICTU Trial Methodology Group in 2019. She currently co-leads an international specialist research group in NIHR MRC TMRP to improve the analysis of harm outcomes in randomized controlled trials and has led multiple national research initiatives to improve the use of statistical methods in laboratory studies, feasibility, and early-phase clinical trials.

Victoria has supervised both clinical and methodological NIHR fellows undertaking research in clinical Trials. Projects include examining the use of Digital Health Interventions (DHI) to improve mental health, Methods to elicit prior distributions for trials in uncommon conditions, and the analysis of adverse events. Victoria has been a member of several funding committees including NIHR EME, Joint Global Health Trials funding Committee, and Wellcome Trust specialist Call for Trials research, and is currently a member of the NIHR Academy Doctoral fellowship board.

After obtaining a BSc in Mathematics and completing a PhD in Statistics in 2000, Victoria joined the Centre for Statistics in Medicine in Oxford working on cancer studies. In 2005 she moved to the Drug Safety Research Unit working part-time designing and analysing post-marketing surveillance studies to monitor the safety of medicines newly released to market. In 2009 she moved to the NIHR Biomedical Research Unit (BRU) at Southampton University as a senior statistician working on allergy and respiratory translational research projects and became a Senior Lecturer in Medical Statistics at King’s College London in 2011 and the Deputy Director for Research Design Service London. Victoria joined Imperial College London in February 2016 as Deputy Head of Statistics for ICTU and was promoted to Reader in Medical Statistics in 2019, and Head of Trial Methodology in 2020.